In an effort to teach my beloved fellow Chicagoans how our school funding system works against us, I visited the land of milk and honey: Winnetka, hometown of Governor Bruce Rauner. Still the best line in recent memory, as far as column writing goes. The median value of a house in Winnetka—one of the wealthiest municipalities in the country according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey—is about $1....
The organizers of WBEZ’s ninth-annual Winter Block Party took inspiration from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing when they named this year’s event: Do the Winter Block Party Thing. The all-ages hip-hop gathering begins at noon and runs till 10 PM at Metro, bringing together dancers, poets, visual artists, and musicians who do right by their communities. Genre-blurring singer-songwriter and poet Tasha Viets-VanLear, one of the party’s marquee acts, honed her craft in informal freestyle circles and as a participant in the Young Chicago Authors program, and till recently she worked as an executive assistant for young black activist organization BYP100....
I don’t think I ever enjoyed watching a movie that annoyed me so much as The Trial of The Chicago 7, Aaron Sorkin’s latest, streaming on Netflix. In 1968, the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago, where Mayor Daley (the father, not the son) had his police beat the crap out of hippie demonstrators, plus a few reporters who got in the way. SCHULTZ: Didn’t you state, Mr. Hoffman, that part of the myth that was being created to get people to come to Chicago was that “We will fuck on the beaches”?...
Act two: a flute trill hurries over a plodding bassoon, chased by string pizzicato, a merry sound that sounds “fun,” “festive,” and “not authentically Chinese“—in this way, not unlike your average takeout, particularly in the rapidity of its delivery. At just about a minute long, Chinese Tea is the shortest divertissement in The Nutcracker. Blink your eyes or blow your nose, and it’s over. But for many people of Asian descent, whether on stage or in the audience, the sound of Chinese Tea is about as festive as a dentist’s drill, and that minute of choreography—which in most renditions includes bowing, scraping, shuffling, head bobbing, and finger jabbing in costumes that are orientalist at best—is an annual testament to centuries of exclusion, objectification, fetishization, and humiliation....
Last year, the York Civic Trust caused a minor stir with its efforts to pay homage to the Yorkshire author, mountaineer, and English queer icon Anne Lister. Outside the church in which, in 1834, she declared a marital commitment—with the church’s blessing, remarkably—to Ann Walker, a rainbow-bordered plaque recognized Lister as a “gender non-conforming entrepreneur.” Some saw the descriptor as one that devalued her contributions to the lesbian community. It’s since been updated to “Lister ....
I told you so. Last year, when I saw Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out at the Humana Festival in Louisville, I said its topical content and efficient structure were sure to earn it a berth in somebody’s subscription season. Sure enough, here it is at Northlight Theatre, its virtues intact. The play gives us four new parents living in close proximity to one another on Long Island. There’s corporate lawyer Jessie, traumatized by her daughter’s touch-and-go birth and thinking she might extend her maternity leave into permanent stay-at-home status....
O n Friday, March 31, 1922, at a remote farm outside the Bavarian town of Kaifeck, someone slaughtered six people-the Gruber family and their maid-striking each one repeatedly on the head and face with a pickax. Four days later neighbors found the bodies. They also discovered that the farm and livestock had been well tended all weekend; the killer had apparently moved in for a while before vanishing. Still, West has assembled potent incidents into an explosive mix, as is her wont....
In the late summer of 1989, Barack Obama drove from Hyde Park to South Shore in his rickety yellow Datsun hatchback to pick up Michelle Robinson, his colleague and adviser at the Loop law firm Sidley Austin, for what would become a historic first date. The short drive is the setting of the opening-credits sequence of Southside With You, an endearing dramatization of the First Couple’s initial romantic outing that stretches, like Before Sunrise, across an eventful day and night....
Courtesy of Wikipedia Kanye West Yeezy season is unmistakably upon us, now that Kanye West has released the official version of “All Day,” the latest single from his forthcoming So Help Me God. The Kanye campaign has been in motion since New Year’s Day, when he released the sentimental “Only One,” the first of his many collaborations with Paul McCartney. The song generated as much hype as any official Kanye track these days, seeding what became an avalanche of trend pieces predicated on the Twitter reactions of young fans who supposedly didn’t know who McCartney was—some of whom were openly or covertly trolling trend-piece writers by feigning ignorance....
Michael Gebert Bun cha ha noi, noodle soup with grilled pork belly and herbs I don’t know what happened at Embeya when co-owner and chef Thai Dang was suddenly and messily locked out by his former partner—one side talked a lot about it and the other not at all, so it’s hard to make a fair judgement. I know what I thought about its initial incarnation as a fine-dining, mostly refined Asian spot: it was a civilized place that served some beautiful food in a gorgeous downtown space (by Karen Herold), and in another time it might have been a runaway hit....
Rapper Leikeli47 grew up in the borough of Brooklyn and the state of Virginia and considers both to be her home turf, but her recent second album and major-label debut, Acrylic (RCA/Hardcover), evokes the sounds of black life throughout the U.S. She references historically black universities and colleges, samples ballroom-culture legend MC Debra, and borrows from heat-stricken gospel, raw dancehall, placid neosoul, blustery NYC radio rap, menacing trap, and an upbeat bricolage of feel-good pop....
Growing up in Logan Square, 24-year-old photographer Deanna J. Smith has seen all the changes swirling around the neighborhood. But for her recent photo class at Columbia College that focuses on photography as a social practice, she wanted to see what the neighborhood looked like from other people’s eyes, like newer residents, older folks, and diverse creatives. And in a time when the world wants us to be apart, bringing together the local community through a common and accessible thread felt extra important....
Chicago punk multi-instrumentalist Seth Engel can deliver a sweet, melancholy riff so gracefully that you’d think he lives inside the guitar chords from Jawbreaker’s Dear You. Engel, who records solo material under the name Options, is a busy young man about town. He drums with mathy progressive trio Pyramid Scheme as well as heavy indie-rockers Great Deceivers, and he’s a member of several groups that are on pause, including Lifted Bells and Anthony Fremont’s Garden Solutions....
Years ago at the bar, a man named Paulie told me all about the neighborhood that I live in now. It’s west of Canaryville, north of Englewood, east of Back of the Yards, and south of the Stockyards proper. I sometimes call it New City, after the original official community area name for this area, but that can get confusing for people, and lately I’ve been relenting and using “Back of the Yards” even though it doesn’t feel right because I always thought Back of the Yards started at Ashland....
Earlier this week, I questioned the convictions of syndicated editorial cartoonist Steve Kelley. He’d just ripped Hillary Clinton over the question of whether she’d been fed answers at last week’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum” on NBC. But there’s a big difference between finding an accusation “believable” and actually believing it. The “I wouldn’t put it past her” standard is good enough for most people, but it takes more than that to make an accusation stick....
By now Donald Trump has made so many racist and offensive comments that it’s hard to remember a time when it was surprising. But when the documentary F*** Your Hair begins, in June 2015, Trump has just launched his presidential campaign—and 5 Rabbit Cervecería, a Latin-inspired local brewery, is brewing a golden ale as the house beer for Rebar in Trump Tower Chicago. When Trump makes a speech in which he calls Mexican immigrants “rapists” and says they’re bringing drugs and crime to the U....
Daru Smith is in a hospital bed at the University of Chicago and his organs are failing. Specifically, three of his organs are failing—his heart, his liver, and his kidneys. “Daru—excuse the language,” Daru tells me, snapping out of recounting his out-of-body experience. “Daru, this is the shit they say happens when you die! . . . I’m at peace, I’m walking towards the light, I’m gonna fucking die!” The heart, liver, kidney triple crown is something of a specialty for UChicago medicine....
Music scenes are a lot like high school lunch tables: people congregate with others who share not only genres but touring networks, mutual friends, and even inside jokes. When their musical styles are especially similar as well, subtle differences in, say, the application of an arpeggiating guitar are what distinguish like-minded musical acts from each other. “Soundcloud rap” is an vague term glommed onto many budding MCs with a slightly aggro style and an account on the streaming audio platform....
By a despicable margin, America has the highest rate of female incarceration in the world. Only in the past few years have the nation’s criminal justice institutions begun to acknowledge how decades of draconian sentencing practices have positioned the United States as a despotic outlier among nations of the developed world when it comes to “correcting” its criminal offenders—and the unfriendly environment it introduces them to upon release. Boo Killebrew’s airtight, blood-curdling new masterpiece uses the broken criminal justice system as a backdrop, then zooms in on what is indisputably one of the most exacting and holistic character studies onstage this year....
Former Chicago trumpeter Jaimie Branch was one of last year’s big success stories in jazz. Her long-overdue debut as a leader, Fly or Die (International Anthem), captured her protean strength and melodic vision with stunning concision and soul, and synthesized some of her many musical interests into a cogent postbop direction that allowed for plenty of free expression. But Branch has endless curiosity about all sorts of music, and with Anteloper, a duo project with drummer Jason Nazary, she’s opened up fresh paths....
